Headline Partner

Nader Hosni, Director of Business Intelligence and Martech, Allwyn

Describe your career to date

For more than 20 years, I have been a data, technology, and transformation leader and evangelist. Interestingly though, I graduated as a Naval Engineer and worked in ship design and ship building. Then, I completed a master’s degree in Melbourne and had a teaching stint in academia, which ultimately landed me in strategy consulting in Tokyo.

But my story with data was destined – I seemed to have a knack for it – my mentors always put me on data strategy client assignments. After more university and professional courses, I became a BI and Data specialist through and through; from source to target, from ETL to visualisation and insight, and from select statement to machine learning model.

I have enjoyed the strategy work, the technical challenges, as well as the execution and delivery. When I moved to London more than a decade ago, I was able to bring this breadth of experience into my consulting roles with Deloitte and then with IBM. Building and leading a data function at the London Stock Exchange was one of my biggest challenges, which made the success in embedding this target operating model even more rewarding.

The most unique and fulfilling experience for me is my time with The National Lottery. I implemented a new target operating model with an offshore factory model, revolutionise the whole data stack from on-prem to Cloud, and took the digital marketing to a whole new level with our lakehouse and its interplay with MarTech.

Data literacy is a key enabler of the value and impact from data. How are you approaching this within your organisation?

My approach to enhancing data literacy across the organisation spans three main dimensions. Firstly, investment in data democratisation, training and education, then resourcing and recruiting with data literacy in mind, and most importantly, advocacy, evangelism, and culture-shaping for a data-driven future.

The roadmap and strategy can be summarised as follows; for the culture change we have a few prongs:

Establishing communities of practices to foster and encourage collaboration around data topics or domains.
Integrating data into workflows and formal processes.

Communication and advocacy at all levels and flooding the zone with messaging about data-driven value.
Iteration and continuous improvement.

Investment in training and education includes creating a training curriculum for periodic and repetitive reinforcement and identifying data champions, as well as incentivising them to take higher certifications and adopting the responsibility to educate others.

Secondly, establishing universal accessibility to data and data democratisation will require continuous evolution and enhancement of data tooling, as well as increase in software licencing.

Finally, a reward and recognition programme will be necessary to reinforce the message for those who show excellence in data literacy skills.

The bedrock and foundation underlying all of this is the leadership buy-in and strong sponsorship at the highest levels.

Have you been able to fix the data foundations of your organisation, particularly with regard to data quality?

We are undergoing another major iteration of most of our systems currently, with data quality and data governance at the heart of the design principles.

Nader Hosni
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